Pragmatic, Legal Steps Can Be Components of Tax Resistance Strategy

If your tax resistance is motivated largely by a desire to take resources away
from the government, or to reduce the amount that people provide resources to
the government, then it may not matter to you so much whether the means of
accomplishing this are illegal civil disobedience or merely legal tax
reduction strategies. For this reason, some tax resistance campaigns have
included a pragmatic tax education component. Here are some examples:

For several years, I participated in the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance
(or VITA)
program, which enlists ordinary people like you and me to help
people — typically people with low incomes — fill out their income tax
returns. The program is sponsored by the
IRS,
which trains the volunteers in tax preparation. The great majority of
returns filed through the program result in refunds rather than additional
payments (at a ratio of about 15:1), and so by volunteering I was able to
take money from the government and give it back to tax filers.

Another war tax resister and tax preparer, John Hammar, remarked in
1997 that “If every resister just had one or
two times [the amount of] their own taxes kept away [from the government]
by helping others cut their tax bills, our efforts would then become a
factor in the national budget.”

French farmers in the
17th and 18th
centuries used (and shared among themselves) every legal trick they
could discover (and several less legal ones besides) to reduce or
eliminate the tithes due on their crops: for instance by growing new crop
varieties that were not contemplated by the tithe laws, and planting
“gardens” or “orchards” or “meadows” that were exempt although
functionally equivalent to the taxed fields.

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